Famine has been conventionally associated with Africa, and portrayed visually through stereotypes. As in recent media coverage of the crisis in East Africa, photographs of starving children with fly-blown faces, removed from their context, remain common.

Dr Dave Clark, working as a multimedia journalist for China Daily, set out this summer to do something different. Focusing on the larger issue of food insecurity in Asia, he photographed, filmed and produced a six-part video series to provide a more complex story. Shooting in Nepal, Bangladesh and China, Clark explored the impact of population growth, urban growth, changing tastes and biotechnology. You can see all of the videos (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) on his Vimeo site.

This video series saw Clark put into practice many of the questions he had research in his PhD thesis, Representing the Majority World. Uppermost in his mind was the desire to avoid traditional famine imagery, even though – as in the photograph above – circumstances in Nepal offered him the chance to easily replicate the stereotypes.

Working with local journalists to find how food insecurity manifested itself in daily life, Clark has presented a rich account of food insecurity. Although he believes this series is far from perfect, Clark has nonetheless shown how different stories are possible.

In recent months I’ve written a series of posts on famine coverage in ‘Africa’. If you missed these posts at my personal blog, here are some excerpts and links:

Stereotypes that Move: in a forthcoming essay on the iconography of famine (which prompted my earlier post on famine photographs and the need for careful critique, and is attached to this post on stereotypes) I have examined the portraits of atrocity that represented the 2002 Malawi famine and which later circulated in charity appeals and the 2005 Live 8 campaign, especially the photographs of a young boy called Luke Piri taken by The Daily Mirror‘s staff photographer Mike Moore. The easy conclusion of this analysis is that famine iconography should be roundly condemned as simplistic, reductionist, colonial and even racist. But before we are satisfied with this comprehensive rebuke we have to ask three difficult questions. First, would we be better off without these photographs altogether? Second, if we want to dispense with the negative, what is the alternative that should take its place if, as I’ve argued earlier, we don’t want to fall into the trap of prompting an equally simplistic ‘positive’ image? And third, what happens if the iconography of famine is politically necessary in certain contexts?

The Photography of Suffering as ‘Pornography’? What does it mean to use this term so frequently in relation to so many different situations? What are the conditions supposedly signified by ‘pornography’? Might this singular term obscure more than it reveals?

The Starving Child as a Symbolic Marker: Contemporary news photographs are chosen less for their descriptive function and more for their capacity to provide symbolic markers to familiar interpretations and conventional narratives, as one image of a malnourished child shows.

Famine Iconography as a Sign of Failure: Prompted by the East African crisis, this post argues we can easily lament the limitations of famine iconography, especially the way it homogenises, anthropomorphises, infantilises and impoverishes. But above all else we have to understand it is a visual sign of failure. The recourse to the stereotypes of famine is driven by the complex political circumstances photography has historically been unable to capture. This means that when we see the images of distressed people, feeding clinics and starving babies, we are seeing the end result of a collective inability to picture causes and context. This argument prompted a considerable debate, which I discussed here and here.

In contrast to the reiteration of stereotypes – even though they can be politically necessary in certain contexts – its important to consider what the new visuals of ‘Africa’ might be, something I broached in a post of that name last June.